


The Way We Bare Our Souls

by Keeper of Tales (CodenameLoki)



Series: The Way We Bare Our Souls [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Prejudice, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 21:00:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13532451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CodenameLoki/pseuds/Keeper%20of%20Tales
Summary: Mages have bird daemons, everyone knows that.Dorian is different. It follows that his daemon would also be different.[Accepting prompts/suggestions for this AU- see note at start of fic]





	The Way We Bare Our Souls

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to make this a series, all in a Dragon Age daemon AU, but I'm not sure what/where to go with it so I'm open for suggestions or prompts. 
> 
> Drop me a comment/PM if there's anything/anyone you'd particularly like to see.
> 
> As long as it's daemon AU and doesn't break my canon pairings (Dorian/Trevelyan and m!Hawke/Anders), I'll give it a shot. I already have folks' daemons picked out, and I'm itching to use em.
> 
> I might do one on how Cole gets his daemon.

Mages have bird daemons, everyone knows that.

Dorian knows that. He's grown up knowing that, surrounded by flitting wings and the clack of beaks. House Pavus' emblem is, naturally, the peacock. His father has an oriole, his mother a swift-winged kestrel.

Salazar has worn owls and hawks, sharp eyed jays and tiny nuthatches and every corvid either of them could think of.

When he settles as a small black king-snake,as long as Dorian's arm and about the width of two of his fingers, Dorian is not really surprised. He is different. It follows that his daemon would also be different. 

He gazes into the pinpoint, soulless eyes- and they're brown, not black- and feels the forked tongue brushing against his face. Smooth, cool scales tighten around his wrist, black and gleaming. Dorian never knew snake scales could gleam.

It's fine. This is fine. 

"This is you," he tells his daemon, softly.

"This is us," Salazar replies, in a papery-slithering voice. 

Dorian smiles.

-

His father is furious, of course, although Magister Halward won't actually lower himself to an outburst. 

"Put it away," is all he says, and his voice is colder than Salazar could ever be. 

Dorian does, and people give him odd, fearful looks when he moves past them without a flash of feathers above his head, without sleek talons gripping his shoulder. He wonders if they think he has no daemon, or if his daemon is shy. He's certain it never crosses their mind that his daemon is a snake. He's a mage, after all.

Everyone knows mages have bird daemons.

The upper class love their showy species; the floors of the Magisterium are packed full of owls and eagles, peacocks and parrots. No tiny jewelled hummingbirds here, no. Nothing so common and drab as a moorhen. If there are jays, they are blue jays, bright and striking. 

He's met mages with tiny birds, kept under hats or tucked into robes. Hummingbirds, little finches, juncos. He relies on this. 

That they all belong to mages ranked lower than Altus is just another mark against him, another way that Dorian is different. 

He wonders how many of them are hiding snakes, rabbits, polecats. He wonders what happens in Tevinter when your daemon is a hyena or a horse, and you are a mage. 

He finds out one night, rifling through papers in his father's study; nothing else to do but snoop when you're locked up on an estate. Dorian is tired of seeing no one but servants, tired of being trapped in his father's dreams and plans. He is tired of the idea that he must be hidden.

He can't even remember what he was looking for, now. Not after the cold wave of shock laps his shores, not once the paper etched with arcane symbols flutters out of his numb fingers to rest on the polished floor.

He leaves the estate that night, injuring three servants and killing a guardsman before vanishing into the countryside with Salazar looped around his neck like living jewellery. He will beg shelter with Mae, he will go back to Alexius, he will use his silver tongue to make his way, but he- they- will not stay here to be fixed when they are not broken. 

They are different, not wrong, and they will not be changed.

-

It isn't until he goes South, until he meets a woman with yellow eyes and a speckled falcon, that he finds out that witches are the ones who always have bird daemons.

All witches are mages; not all mages are witches. The idea that all mages must have bird daemons, Morrigan says, comes from the legend being mistold, warping in the telling and retelling. Witches and shamans have bird daemons; people eventually took this to mean all mages would be the same. Tis true, she says, most mages have bird daemons. Birds have long been associated with the occult and arcane. 

But not all, she tells him. Not all.

Varric tells him that a mage he knows, Merrill, has an otter daemon. 

Tranquil in the South, especially those severed from their daemons before settling, almost never have birds. 

None of the ones he meets have bird daemons. He never tells the others that seeing Tranquil with their daemons at all is a surprise; the Southern opinion of Tevinter is dreadful enough.

He wishes he could have told his father all of these things.

-

It hurts, when he hears "he doesn't even have a proper daemon" come out of Sera's mouth, even if it's flippant, and he knows it is. It hurts because he sees the sentiment reflected in Cassandra's eyes and the eyes of her ridgeback hound, in the way Blackwall's beard bristles the first time Salazar pokes his head out of Dorian's collar to address the false Warden's badger daemon. Dorian hides his hurt, like he always has, behind a mocking laugh and a snarky comment. 

The Inquisitor doesn't seem to care though. Trevelyan's lioness, lovely pale cream fur and blue eyes, is happy to have Salazar twine around her neck, as Dorian twines around the Inquisitor at night. 

He's good with words, with his hands and his tongue and his body, but not with emotions, not really. He's too well practiced at drowning them in drink. Dorian has never been in love before, but he has learned to hope for more.

He wonders what the words would feel like on his tongue, how they'd sound in his voice. 

He's not ready. He wants to be. 

The Inquisitor understands, because he is that kind of person. Warm and caring, wry wit and subtle intelligence under his serious exterior; he is both disarmingly naive and acutely perceptive. He doesn't push Dorian; he doesn't need to. 

They have shown it, each in their own way.

And when Salazar slips his head from Dorian's shoulder to brush the Inquisitor's neck- a cold, dry touch that Trevelyan does not recoil from- they find it doesn't need to be said.

**Author's Note:**

> Dorian's daemon is a Mexican black kingsnake, by the way. I have one. Named Salazar.


End file.
